If you have very recent alc(4) hardware, it may be supported now. If you are booting over NFS, it may be faster now. These changes are unrelated other than both being recent – NFS is improved for any chipset.
Author:
01/27/2015
powerd refinements for DragonFly
powerd now can be adjusted on DragonFly, for quicker returns to high CPU frequencies, or slower … slowdowns? It’s quickly quick or slowly slow. That’s not the best explanation, but I like rhymes. For a less stupid description, look at the man page, which now includes usage examples.
01/26/2015
i915 improvements to test
Francois Tigeot has updated the drm/i915 code again, matching Linux 3.10 for feature level… but it’s a big update. If you are
- Running DragonFly-master
- Using a i915 chipset
- (optional) On a chipset that is not Haswell or Ivy Bridge
… He could use your testing and feedback.
A DragonFly laptop for me
I’m saving up for one of those Acer c720p Chromebooks that people seem to be enjoying. If you have enjoyed the Digest for a long time and want to help, please do. Of course it’s to run DragonFly.
Thanks to the generosity of a bunch of people, I’ll get a C720 and an SSD too. Thank you all very much, people I have never met but would like to shake the hands of.
01/25/2015
Lazy Reading for 2015/01/25
All over the spectrum this week.
- The Story of the Intel 4004. (via)
- Why Perl Didn’t Win. Some methods that could be useful for the BSDs here. (via)
- uBlock, a less-resource-intensive version of AdBlock. (via joris on EFNet #dragonflybsd)
- Emacs user at work. (via alexh on EFNet #dragonflybsd)
- Librem 15, “A Free/Libre Software Laptop”. Blobless. (via Mike)
- How to cheat at the future. Something I need to address for this very Digest. (via)
- What does {some strange unix command name} stand for? (via)
- Your entire PC in a mouse. (via)
- So I bought a mechanical keyboard.
- Emacs is my new window manager. (via)
- m-x start-them-early.
- Slackbot bot. (via)
- List of Good Free Programming and Data Resources. (via)
- Open Hardware Random Number Generator. (via EFNet #dragonflybsd)
- The Hemingwrite. Looks like a TRS-80. (via)
- The Emularity.
Your unrelated link of the week: Skymall, 2007.
01/24/2015
In Other BSDs for 2014/01/24
Short week this week, mostly due to a lack of interesting source changes.
- Learn Unix the Hard Way. Actually OpenBSD and nothing except a table of contents yet. (via)
- How not to upgrade your systems.
- Linux vs. BSD: which should you use? Nothing new discovered here. (via)
- PC-BSD 10.1.1-RC1 Now Available.
- Some upcoming BSD-related books from Michael Lucas.
- NYCBUG events for January and February.
- Extracting pkgsrc packages without packages. (saves time with NFS)
- FreeBSD and Vagrant. (via nycbug-talk mailing list)
- Make PC-BSD work like Windows.
- Lumina 0.8.1 is out.
- urndis(4) is how you tether OpenBSD to a phone; or use it as a hotspot.
- There’s a BSD meetup happening February 19th in Hannover, Germany.
01/23/2015
DragonFly and LGA1150
Matthew Dillon purchased some Haswell-based motherboards, and documented his hardware setup, for anyone who is looking to build a decent, new DragonFly system.
DragonFly 4.0.3 images available
ISO/IMG files for DragonFly 4.0.3 have been uploaded and by now should be available on your favorite mirror. You should update for the OpenSSL upgrade. If you already have DragonFly 4.0.x installed, the normal ‘make buildworld && make buildkernel && make installkernel && make installworld && make upgrade’ cycle should work just fine.
01/22/2015
BSDNow 073: Pipe Dreams
It’s Thursday, and that means a new BSDNow episode. The interview is with David Maxwell, who gave a talk about Unix pipelines at MeetBSD 2014. There’s the usual amount of discussion of recent topics, too, and I see they have a new sponsor.
DragonFly 4.0.3 out
DragonFly 4.0.3 has been tagged; you can look at the tagging message for details, but the major reason for doing so is to include OpenSSL-1.0.1l. I will have images up soon.
01/21/2015
Slider, Hammer, and how to
John Marino has written up an extensive how-to for slider, the history tool for Hammer filesystems, including screenshots.
The mixer remembers
Thanks to Sascha Wildner porting from FreeBSD, mixer(8) now remembers state. This is something I’ve wanted for a long time.
01/20/2015
Don’t forget moused
For whatever reason, I’ve seen several people in the last week or so have mouse problems on install, and they were often solved by running moused. So, there’s your little reminder.
Glasgow OpenBSD presentation
Normally I’d hold this off until the In Other BSDs item on Saturday, but by then it will be too late: There’s a “Building redundant and transparent firewalls with OpenBSD” presentation happening at the Scottish Linux User’s Group meeting, Thursday night in Glasgow, Scotland.
01/19/2015
Book review: FreeBSD Essentials: Storage Mastery
Normally if I talk about a filesystem here, I talk about Hammer, which is not a surprise. However, I often read and review Michael W. Lucas’s BSD-oriented books, and he has written FreeBSD Mastery: Storage Essentials. I’m reviewing it here because it’s obviously BSD-related, and some portions are directly relevant for other BSDs.
Disk setup and layout isn’t something that normally consumes much attention past the initial install – until something goes wrong, or until a system needs a new configuration. Installers tend to hide that initial layout, anyway.
Vendors take advantage of this. Much of the specialized storage vendors out there are selling you a computer with disks in it – something you can build yourself. You don’t (or at least I hope you don’t) buy a firewall when you can do the same with pf or ipfw; the same goes for disk management.
There’s plenty of coverage of GEOM, GELI, GDBE, and the other technologies specific to FreeBSD. I for one did not know how GEOM worked, with its consumer/producer model – and I imagine it’s complex to dive into when you’ve got a broken machine next to you. If you are administering FreeBSD systems, especially ones that deal with dedicated storage, you will find this useful. He doesn’t go into ZFS, but he does hint at a book on it later…
If you’re not a FreeBSD user, there’s also material that’s common to any BSD – an explanation of disk architecture, of UFS, RAID, and SMART. Knowing what SMART is and does is essential, in my opinion. You may be able to cobble this material together from other sources online, but it’s packaged nicely here, with Lucas’s easy writing style.
It’s a self-published book, and as such the download nets you three different formats. It’s currently $10 and DRM-free, directly from the author. You can also order physical versions, if you like paper.
01/18/2015
Lazy Reading for 2015/01/18
Not sure how I ended up with so many interesting conference links. There’s some substantial reading here too, so clear your schedule.
- A long-overdue update of the Cluetrain Manifesto. (via)
- AWS Tips I Wish I’d Known Before I Started. (via)
- Secure Secure Shell. (via)
- Hacking a Gameboy with a speedrun bot to program new games. It’s hard to wrap my brain around. (via)
- Operating System development in Rust.
- Speaking of which, Rust just reached 1.0A. (via)
- Improving your PuTTY connections.
- The Intel Compute stick looks fun.
- RIPE70 is in Amsterdam in March; the Call for Papers is out.
- NANOG 63 is in Texas at the start of February; registration and the agenda are up.
- Vintage Computer Fest East 10 is in April in New Jersey. It’s hands-on – you get to run the old computers! (via)
- CiE 2015, a cross-disciple conference in late June in Bucharest, also may interest you. (via)
- The Millennial Literalist.
- Robots are starting to break the law and nobody knows what to do about it. (via)
- Event Notify Test Runner, or entr. Runs arbitrary commands when a file changes. It was also talked about at the NYCBUG meeting that just happened.
- Moving Beyond TCP/IP.
- This program is the equivalent of ENIAC. Really! They’re both for calculating ballistics. (also via)
- The Tears of Donald Knuth. (via multiple places)
- When The Sky Is Falling. DDOS mitigation, in slides. (via)
- The Morris Worm, as a physical artifact.
01/17/2015
In Other BSDs for 2015/01/17
Lots of material this week.
- New Update GUI for PC-BSD / Automatic Updates.
- Lumina Desktop 0.8.0 Released.
- (side note) I see these PC-BSD items in src updates, but these published summaries are so complete it’s better to wait and post them instead. Other software orgs, take note.
- A week of pkgsrc, #6.
- Making the switch.
- Configuring X forwarding between BSD and Windows. (via)
- The 4th quarter 2014 FreeBSD report is out.
- Digital Ocean now supports FreeBSD.
- Using TrueOS as a IPFW based home router.
- Be your own VPN provider with OpenBSD. (via)
- pfSense University classes are available online.
- Jetpack, a FreeBSD-based app container, i.e. Docker, etc. (via)
- No more install floppies for NetBSD, at least on amd64.
- OpenBSD adds binary patching, at least on amd64.
- Lid suspension is now on by default in OpenBSD.
- OpenBSD on an Intel Galileo.
- Security: OpenBSD vs FreeBSD. (via)
- FreeBSD added Data Center TCP (DCTCP).
- FreeBSD’s new page clustering strategy.
- FreeBSD has a new MINIMAL kernel config.
- FreeBSD has multiboot support for Xen Dom0.
- Yay, cross-pollination!
01/16/2015
Google Compute Engine and DragonFly?
Can someone with experience on Google Compute Engine try out running DragonFly on it? There’s FreeBSD instructions, so it might work.
Which wireless cards for DragonFly?
The short answer is ath(4) and iwn(4), via this post. There’s an update coming for the wireless infrastructure in DragonFly; Matthew Dillon and Adrian Chadd (on the FreeBSD side) are working together for improvements.
While I’m mentioning recommendations, the Silicon Image 3132 chipset is apparently excellent for eSATA drives on DragonFly.
01/15/2015
BSDNow 072: Common *Sense Approach
As promised last week, the BSDNow show has an interview with Jos Schellevis of OPNSense, along with the normal array of stories and links.
01/14/2015
sshlockout in DragonFly
Matthew Dillon’s added a sshlockout utility, to temporarily block SSH traffic from repeated brute force SSH login attempts. It’s been mentioned before, but it’s in the system now. It’s been refashioned to work with pf.
01/13/2015
Major DragonFly sound update
Francois Tigeot has performed a major upgrade of DragonFly’s sound system. If you had sound problems or unsupported hardware before, this may fix them. It will require a full buildworld+buildkernel.
01/12/2015
More DragonFly/Chromebook tricks
Romick posted some more tips on setting up various special keys on an Acer c720 Chromebook, running DragonFly of course, and Matthew Dillon also has backlight key configuration. I wish I had a spare $200 right now for one of these.
BSDNow 071: System Disaster
I managed to miss this last week because of issues with my RSS feeds, but the 71st episode of BSDNow is/has been up. It’s “systemd isaster”, cause the interview is with Ian Sutton talking about BSD replacements for systemd dependencies. There’s a number of at-least-slightly DragonFly-related things in there, including OPNSense, pkgng, and Hammer mentions.
01/11/2015
Lazy Reading for 2015/01/11
Historical links are the accidental theme this week.
- RFC Reader. For those uncomfortable with plaintext? (via)
- The truth about C & Unix history. An oldie but goodie. (via)
- After several decades, there’s still no standard for querying registration data, surprisingly. There’s something coming together, though.
- Plan-55A, store and forward messaging – on paper. (via)
- 1980s sci-fi show openings. No fancy House of Hobbit Thrones catering to nerds back then… this was as good as it got. (via)
- Who named Silicon Valley? (via)
- Unix people cards. (via)
- Big Boring System, a text only online community, and another sort of throwback like tilde.club. (via)
- The Cryptographic Doom Principle. A clear explanation. (via)
- TL;DR-ify, a One Thing Well item. Happens to contain a paragraph-sized 40-year history of hypertext on the bottom of that page.
- Ping stories. I’ve linked to other versions before. (via)
- The history of grep. (via)
- The little book about OS development. (via)
- Decentralize All the Things! (via)
- That previous link took me to Gary Bernhardt’s Twitter feed, where I saw this pun. Also this truth.
- His site is destroyallsoftware.com. I like the ‘screencasts’ idea; much easier to watch than some person in a room staring into a camera.
- Also also found through that link: Sandstorm, a personal server setup. My initial impression is that it’s similar to Owncloud. I wish more people did this.
- Also also also: from Justin Cormack through Twitter: Unhosted.
01/10/2015
In Other BSDs for 2015/01/10
I got this done early, for once.
- Dissecting OpenBSD’s divert(4). (via)
- Running ownCloud with httpd on OpenBSD (via)
- OpenBSD 2014 by the numbers. (via)
- Code rot & OpenBSD. Many comments at the original link. (via)
- Accessing radio hardware switches in NetBSD.
- What does this Etherswitch framework do?
- FreeBSD now has Elf Tool Chain utilities, which appears to be BSD-licensed versions of binutils; possibly more?
- FreeBSD is now on Gnome 3.
- BSDCan 2015’s Call For Papers is out.
- NYCBUG is meeting January 13th at a new location for “Designing Versatile Unix Utilities“, presented by Eric Radman.
- There’s a new BSD user group in the Albany, NY area.
- BSD Magazine for December 2014 is out. (via)
4.0.2 images up
I’m breaking my normal weekend posting schedule to note that DragonFly 4.0.2 images are now linked on the main site and on mirrors now/soon.
01/08/2015
DragonFly 4.0.2 released
DragonFly 4.0.2 has been tagged. I’m building the release images now. If you’re already running 4.0.1 it’ll be easy enough to upgrade to; you will want to catch up to this commit fixing a quiet memory issue.
01/07/2015
Multiple disk speedup
The CAM layer in DragonFly has had its big lock removed/been marked MPSAFE, so you will notice a performance increase when using multiple disks. (assuming you aren’t throughput-limited, of course.)
DragonFly on a VPS
That’s Virtual Private Server, if you don’t know the term. I mentioned VPSs and BSD before in a In Other BSDs article, but “Ed” found an article specifically about installing DragonFly on Vultr.
01/06/2015
ZFS and Hammer conversation
There’s a FreeBSD Forums thread about ZFS and Hammer, as several people have pointed out to me. It’s interesting to see, but there isn’t a lot of quantitative discussion. (It’s a forum post, not a white paper, though.)
Library building with DragonFly
Do you remember the BSDNow story a while ago about a Tanzanian community effort using FreeBSD to build a library? They’re looking at DragonFly, too, because of the low resource requirements. From that discussion: a hardware reason for an ‘indefinite wait buffer’ error, and a note on how to most efficiently download packages for multiple machines.
01/05/2015
V4-mapped addresses out, TCP MTU discovery in
Sepherosa Ziehau has posted a note that V4-mapped addressing is no longer supported in DragonFly. You will need to do a full buildworld/buildkernel if you are running master. Also, TCP MTU path discovery is on by default. Also also, he’s added a SOL_SOCKET/SO_CPUINT socket option for use to reduce load in heavy network activity. As usual, I don’t quite comprehend.
Backlights, improvements for your i915
You can now control your backlight settings through sysctl and enjoy greater video support/stability – as long as you are using a i915 video chipset on DragonFly.
01/04/2015
Lazy Reading for 2015/01/04
My end of year vacation is over tomorrow, darnit.
- My $2375 Amazon EC2 Mistake.
- The Old New Thing 2014 link clearance.
- This sentence proves it is The Future.
- Another hidden computer/exposure surface. (via)
- Preserving arcade games. (via)
- The Retro-Computing Society of Rhode Island. (via)
- The Internet version of ‘empty calories‘. (via)
- Quake on an oscilloscope: A technical report. (via)
- From Gongkai to open source. I don’t totally agree, but it’s compelling.
- Virtualizing an operating system to run a text editor. (via)
- On the curl | sh pattern. (via)
- geektyper.com. A modern ‘boss key’. (via)
- A Microsoft-centric developer switches into open source. (via)
- Why aren’t we using SSH for everything? (via)
01/03/2015
In Other BSDs for 2015/01/03
Remembered to do this all at the last minute, after I got the new server up.
- LibertyBSD, an OpenBSD fork with no non-free firmware.
- OPNSense, a FreeBSD-based firewall that is new to me.
- OpenBSD projects that aren’t OpenBSD.
- Broken build tracker for pkgsrc. (via)
- pkgsrc-2014Q4 is out.
- pkgviews is gone from pkgsrc.
- NetBSD can now record MIDI files from /dev/music.
- How to see hidden pf tables.
- The OpenBSD Foundation met their fundraising goal for 2014.
- Typing in Japanese in OpenBSD. (via)
- Tor relay issues on OpenBSD, in two slightly munged threads.
- OpenBSD and syslog, over TCP.
- FreeBSD has updated to Unbound 1.5.1 and clang/llvm/lldb to 3.5.0.
- bhyve on FreeBSD has an improved Real Time Clock.
- GNU texinfo is out of FreeBSD.
- FreeBSD’s asr(4) driver is gone too.
- pcc 1.1.0 was recently released. (via)
01/02/2015
Site back to normal
I’m moved over to new hardware for the Digest. Tell me if you see issues, please.
01/01/2015
BSDNow 070: Daemons in the North
The BSDNow people aren’t slowing down for the holidays, as there’s another episode this week. The interview is with Dan Langille, about the 2015 BSDCan conference. He’s also the person behind freebsddiary.org, which served as partial inspiration for the Digest. There’s also more video presentation links, news items, and so on.
Site downtime
shiningsilence.com/dragonflydigest.com will be going down for a brief period in the next 24 hours, for a hardware upgrade.
12/30/2014
Slider, for Hammer
John Marino has created something very useful: a graphical tool for Hammer file history. It’s called ‘Slider’, and it uses curses to work in a terminal. It shows historic versions of files and can restore those old versions as needed. This was already possible in Hammer, of course, but it required a sequence of commands that were not straight-forward. I’ve been slow enough posting it that version 2.0 is already out, offering a way to see files that no longer exist, but are still in history. (i.e. deleted some time ago) ‘Time Machine’ sounds like the best name, but that seems to be taken.
12/29/2014
Book Review: The Book of PF, 3rd edition
I’m going to dive right in with an anecdote: As is normal for anyone in systems administration, I’m busy at work. I’ve been short an employee for some time, and I brought in a managed service provider to do some work. This included a revamping of the network equipment and layout, as it has been growing organically rather than in a planned fashion.
I received the formal assessment from the provider a few weeks ago, and it mentioned that we were using a non ICSA-certified firewall: pf, in the form of pfSense. This was accompanied by some rather drastic warnings about how open source was targeted by hackers! and implied that ICSA certification was a mark of quality rather than a purchasable certification. All bogus, of course.
The reason I’m starting this review with this little story is to note that while open source has become well-accepted for system and application software, there’s still a lot of people that expect commercial hardware to be exclusively handling data once it leaves the server. That’s been valid for a long time, but software like pf represents a realistic option, or even an improvement, over many commercial and proprietary options. Since pf exists in one form or another on all the BSDs, it’s a tool you should be at least somewhat familiar with.
Peter N. M. Hansteen has written about pf first online, and then in printed form, for some time. The Book of PF is in its third edition, and that’s what I have to read. (Disclosure: No Starch Press gave me the book free, without requirements)
The book is excellent, and easier to read than I expected for a book about network processing. It can be read in linear form, as it takes the reader from simple to more complex network layouts. It works as a reference book, too, as it focuses on different tools around pf and what they are used for.
It covers the different pf version in OpenBSD, NetBSD, and FreeBSD, and DragonFly gets at least a partial mention in some portions of the book. For example, OpenBSD recently removed ALTQ, but the other BSDs still use it. With- and without-ALTQ scenarios are covered every place it applies. You’re going to get the most mileage out of an OpenBSD setup with it, though.
The parts where the book shines are the later chapters; the descriptions of greylisting and spamd, the traffic shaping notes, and the information on monitoring pf will be useful for most anyone. It’s quite readable; similar in tone to Peter’s blog. If you enjoy his in-depth online articles, the book will be a pleasant read.
It’s available now from Amazon and directly from No Starch Press. It’s linked in the book slider currently running on the right side of this site, too.
12/28/2014
Lazy Reading for 2014/12/28
Last of the year!
- Glitches: A kind of history. (via)
- Speaking of glitches: Breaking Madden is still going.
- First Commits. (via)
- Your Friendly North Korean Network Observer. (via)
- The SoftSel Hot List for 1986.
- Steel Mill Hacked. How long until having operations disconnected from the Internet becomes a sign of quality for a business? (via)
- Rooms and Mazes: A Procedural Dungeon Generator. (via)
- The Infocom virtual machine, made
fleshsilicon. (via) - DOSBox in the browser. “…watching a miracle with every boot.” (via)
- Inadvertent Algorithmic Cruelty (via)
- The Future: A Cat Litter Box and DRM. “Internet of Things you can’t own”. (via multiple places)
- When Security Goes Right. This is how problems should be handled.
- Images of Math, a tumblr. (via)
- Two eras of the Internet: pull and push. (via)
Your unrelated link of the week: UpDog, a revolutionary communications platform. (via)
12/27/2014
In Other BSDs for 2014/12/27
The list is shorter this week; I blame the Christmas holiday.
- OpenBSD now has position-independent executables for some architectures. That may mean changing your upgrade strategy. (5.6 upgrade guide here)
- FreeBSD now has frequency/voltage control on the Raspberry Pi.
- There’s a lot of v7 ARM architectures. I can see why people are waiting for AARMv8.
- FreeBSD has a new NFS client/server.
- RamNode is another VPS provider that supports BSD. (via)
- Also, cloudspin.me.
- [ is a binary program.
12/25/2014
BSDNow 069: Under the Ports Tree
BSDNow isn’t slowing down for Christmas, cause there’s a new episode up. There’s two interviews this time – Erwin Lansing, about BSD in Europe, and Cristina Vintila, about BSD conferences. The rest of the episode is a bunch of “How did you get into BSD?” stories from viewers, both in text (i.e. read out from email) and the occasional video answer.
12/24/2014
A tip for Hammer disks and history
One way to keep file history on an very active Hammer disk from eating up all the space: more snapshots. This may seem counterproductive, but disk pruning eliminates historical data between snapshots, so you can keep older data at the cost of some temporal accuracy.
How, where, and why DragonFly
As part of another thread, Steve Petrie posted an in-depth description of how and where and why he’s using DragonFly. Worth looking at either for workflow tips or for just seeing the use case.
12/22/2014
BSDTalk 249: Scott Long of Netflix
BSDTalk 249 is an 11 minute interview with Scott Long, who is involved with Netflix’s FreeBSD-based local caching appliances. This conversation is from MeetBSD 2014, though I heard Scott talk about the same subject at the last NYCBSDCon – it’s an astounding amount of data flowing through those machines.
12/21/2014
Lazy Reading for 2014/12/21
I am slightly confused about which day it is.
- Dinosaur’s Pen, excellent old technology pictures. (via)
- Ultima Ratio Regum, a roguelike walking simulator in development. Currently Windows-only.
- 2014 Cacowards winners. These will probably run on most any BSD with a Doom port. (via)
- Effectively Managing Memory at Gmail Scale. All the management issues were in the browser. (via)
- The 12 days of Unix.
- “the artifacts of any media format define its aesthetic like a cultural permalink” (via)
- Origins of the Tablet. (via)
- Hybrid Water Computer. (also via)
- Computers are People, Too. 1982 computer graphics and Disney. (via many places)
- USBdriveby. Maybe gumming up the data parts of your USB ports isn’t such a bad idea. (via)
- Intercal: The Worst Programming Language Ever. A video. (via)
- Why I don’t like hackathons, by Alex Bayley aged 39 1/2. What he describes is very different than the BSD hackathons I’ve known of. (via)
- Useful syadmin tools. Here’s a gift list…
- Learning Unix.
12/20/2014
In Other BSDs for 2014/12/20
I sort of lost a day this week because of an accidental 20-hour workday, but I still have the links:
- I love cross-pollination. (plus)
- “Why I (mostly) hack on BSD licenced stuff: so I don’t have to deal with this.“
- Tips on pkgsrc packaging.
- Kerberos IV is going away in pkgsrc.
- The pkgsrc-2014Q4 freeze is on.
- A new way to build NanoBSD.
- A new ZFS ARC tunable you may need.
- I could have sworn vigr(8) already existed.
- PC-BSD is moving to Qt5.
- A domain blocking script.
- Showing remote programs on your Mac using X.
- Long thread about BSD VPS hosting. (consensus: try RootBSD or Vultr.)
- OpenBSD man is now really mandoc.
- freebsd-update issues for 10.1.
- Steam on PC-BSD 2. (video)
- The (new) PC-BSD upgrade to 10.1 is available.
- Sunday Morning Linux Review on “FreeBSD Mastery: Storage Essentials”
- Sudo: You’re Doing It Wrong.
- “…what’s the best place to start learning about BSD?“
Note: corrected VPS hosting link.
12/19/2014
BSDNow 068: Just the Essentials
BSDNow 068 has a large number video links to various BSD conference videos, a bunch of other article links,, and an interview of Michael W. Lucas about his new FreeBSD Mastery: Storage Essentials book.
12/18/2014
Swapcache and improving performance
From a question about mixing in a SSD and a very slow disk: swapcache can make things better, though I suggest other crazy arrangements.
12/16/2014
dports without X11
If you really, really want to make sure you aren’t pulling in any parts of X when installing dports, and you’re building from source, there’s a few options you can set to keep X11 off your system. You can even go farther.
12/15/2014
IPMI in DragonFly
I had to type it that way because it rhymes. Sascha Wildner has committed an IPMI driver port, tested/watchdogged by Markus Pfeiffer. What’s it do? It’s a machine management standard.
12/14/2014
Lazy Reading for 2014/12/14
Minimal link text this week. It just happened that way.
- random in the wild
- Best Unix time-savers
- Where apps end and the system begins.
- The password? You changed it, right?
- Live network attack map. (via)
- Playing with my son.
- At the computer farm. (via)
- Typography in sci-fi: Alien. (via)
- Turing Complete User. (via)
- XLennart. XBill + systemd (via IRC)
- OSI: The Internet That Wasn’t. (via)
- FOSSASIA, March 13-15, 2015, Singapore. (new to me)
- Nethack: the best game of all time? I still like Angband more. (via)
- moreutils, additional Unix-style utilities. (via)
- Plan9Front. (indirectly via)
- Wang Calculators. Neat physical wiring and even Nixie tubes! (via)
- Fixing a computer with the right type of string. (via)
- Previous, a NeXT emulator. I like the name. (via)
- From the previous source, lighting a NeXT cube on fire.
- “Was isolated from 1999 to 2006 with a 486. Built my own late 80s Operating System” (via)
12/13/2014
In Other BSDs for 2014/12/13
Get ready for some reading.
- There’s some packages moving from pkgsrc-wip to pkgsrc proper.
- pkgsrc-2014Q4 branching is planned for Monday the 15th.
- PC-BSD now has an automatic package/security patch upgrade mechanism.
- Steam on PC-BSD. Holy grail, there.
- PC-BSD needs testers for the new Update Manager, for moving from 10 to 10.1
- NetBSD has imported BIND 9.10.1-P1.
- OpenBSD has added skgpio(4), a driver for the Soekris net6501 GPIO port and LEDs.
- OpenBSD has updated Unbound to 1.5.1.
- Some Japanese input methods for OpenBSD that may work on other BSDs, too.
- pfqstat, a replacements for pfstat designed to work with Charted.
- I don’t know what the ‘BERI Virtio Networking Frontend’ is, but FreeBSD’s got it.
- fstyp(8), the filesystem detector.
- FreeBSD has added AES-ICM and AES-GCM modes to OpenCrypto.
- If you’re stopping in NYC, NYCBUG would like to hear you talk on a topic of interest.
- The case for distributed operating systems in the data center. Sounds like DragonFly’s original charter. (via)
- BSDNow wants to hear your getting-into-BSD story.
- OpenBSD libc version 78.
- There’s a lot of FreeBSD systems at NYI.
- “FreeBSD Mastery: Storage Essentials” is now in physical print.
- “Networking for System Administrators” is next to come out.
- And “Tarsnap Mastery” is next to be written.
- …We’re all benefiting from Michael Lucas going full-time on writing.
12/12/2014
Installworld, no matter what
It’s possible, if you are several releases (years) behind, to end up with a DragonFly system that can’t compile and install the current release, due to incremental changes over time. It’s rare, but it could happen now between, say, version 3.4 and 4.0. The usual solution would be to incrementally upgrade in order, which is a lot of building and updating. The alternative is the new installworld-force option from Matthew Dillon that forces a new set of binaries into place. Use as a last resort.
Virtual I/O performance
If you want to help I/O performance when DragonFly is virtualized, here’s a short checklist of what to work on. I haven’t noticed any problems – but I’m not taxing any of my VMs that heavily.
12/11/2014
BSDNow 067: Must Be Rigged
BSDNow’s episode this week focuses on the just-released Bitrig 1.0, and has an interview with Patrick Wildt of that project. There’s also coverage of other topics, including the new poudriere release – that’s the tool that bulk builds packages for DragonFly and FreeBSD, though I don’t know if it’s unified across both operating systems yet.
IPFW2 branch for testing
bycn82’s rewrite of IPFW2 is available as a git branch to try out; he’s posted the link. Please try, especially if you are still working with the original ipfw.
(note: remember, ‘ipfw’ in DragonFly is what was called ‘ipfw2′ years and years ago because it was a replacement of the original ‘ipfw’ in FreeBSD. It was called ipfw2 but referenced as ipfw so that the same commands worked. Technically, this branch bycn82 is working on would be ipfw3, but he keeps referring to it as ipfw2. Confused? Good.)
12/10/2014
Remember AUTODEEP
If you’re using one of those Acer C720 or C720p Chromebooks with DragonFly, remember to set:
machdep.mwait.CX.idle=AUTODEEP
To automatically enter the right power-saving states on the CPU. You used to have to do it manually, and now you don’t.
12/08/2014
Support for a device nobody has
Sascha Wilder ported over the urio(4) driver to DragonFly. It’s for the USB-based Rio mp3 players. Does anyone have one of these and is running DragonFly? That would be a startling coincidence.
12/07/2014
Lazy Reading for 2014/12/07
Today is my birthday, so I have a gift for you: a lot of reading!
- Don’t panic and keep forking Debian. It leads to devuan.org. For a fork to succeed, they need positive reasons to exist, not just a definition of what it’s not. (via)
- Advent Planet. Follow it, find your interest topic, get something to read daily for the next few weeks.
- On file formats, very briefly. I’ve liked everything of Paul Ford’s that I’ve ever read. (via)
- Fun with Lisp: Programming the NES (via) 6502 chips are so universally hacked on, it seems.
- Bumper Sticker Computer Science. More “epigrams”. Some dated, some excellent. (PDF, via)
- ParkyTowers thin clients. Turning very cheap, very small hardware into usable systems.
- The Odd History of the First Erotic Computer Game. See Softalk link below too. (via)
- Chart Brut: How the MS-Paint Graphics of Conspiracy Took Over the Web. (via)
- Grand St. short-run consumer tech for sale, very much like outgrow.me.
- A Plan 9 Newbie’s Guide. (PDF, via) Coraid uses/used Plan 9?
- The strange world of computer-generated novels. (via)
- Why my book can be downloaded for free.
- Smile, You’re Speaking EMOJI. (via)
- The Softalk Apple Project.
- Unix: tricks with history.
- Clip Art is dead. Awww.
- RowHammer. Ugh. (via)
Your unrelated link of the week: Cyriak’s Adult Swim 2014 compilation.
12/06/2014
In Other BSDs for 2014/12/06
I have been building up quite the variety this week.
- Bitrig 1.0 has been released.
- Writing NetBSD Sound Drivers in Haskell. (PDF, via)
- ruBSD 2014, happening December 13th in Moscow. (via)
- How to configure full disk encryption in PC-BSD 10.1. (via)
- BSD Magazine for November 2014. (via) Why don’t they put new issue announcements in their RSS?
- A week of pkgsrc #5.
- FreeBSD Foundation’s 2014 year-end fundraising.
- FreeBSD Mastery: Storage Essentials is hitting the printers. There’s a quiet mention of the next two books in that series, too.
- Two new kernel errata for OpenBSD.
- BSDCan 2015 (June 2015) has opened up its call for papers, now through Jan 19th, 2015. (via)
- A conversation about UTF-8, Unicode, and file systems.
- A conversation about random vs. phrase passwords.
- New Directions in Operating Systems conference notes. Lots of BSD stuff in there. (via)
- nih-0.13.0 is out for pkgsrc.
- BSD presentations (including DragonFly) at the X Developers Conference. I mentioned the event itself before, but that link wasn’t open to non-subscribers until later, as pointed out to me.
- Coreboot on the BSDs.
- More talk about embedded OpenBSD on cheap machines, including thin client machines repurposed into routers.
- Noticed in that previous link: <$100 Ubuquiti EdgeRouter-Lites can run OpenBSD? FreeBSD too, apparently.
- Is it time to give BSDs a try?
- Fixing PC-BSD upgrade issues.
12/05/2014
The Varialus page
This page, Varialus et Anisoptera, set up by… I’m not sure of the real name but it’s ‘varialus’ on IRC – has a detailed description of the DragonFly install process and installation of MATE, plus extra notes. I always find these sorts of cheatsheets entertaining.
12/04/2014
BSDNow 066: Conference Connoisseur
The 66th BSDNow episode has an interview with Paul Schenkeveld about BSD conferences, and of course the usual variety of news, including something about a BSD-powered library in Africa; something that is entirely out of the blue to me.
Fred, in color
The DragonFly boot menu has been cleaned up a bit, and Fred, the dragonfly drawn on DragonFly, is now in better color. In fact, there’s even an option to turn him blue.
Update: I wanted to see what this looked like, and I realized screenshots might help everyone else.
12/03/2014
A pile of DragonFly commits
In an effort to reduce my backlog of DragonFly things to post about, here’s quick notes:
- The path to xauth is now configurable, though correct by default. (that’s bit me in the past)
- There’s a new callout*() implementation.
- cpuctl(4) has been imported to allow CPU microcode updates.
- libm has been updated with math functions from FreeBSD and NetBSD, which because of library versioning support, won’t cause compatibility problems for older vs. newer DragonFly versions.
- C++11 support is also now available.
12/02/2014
svc(8), service manager for DragonFly
I’m running behind so this is a bit old, but: Matthew Dillon commited svc(8), a service manager program. Take a look at its man page to see the potential uses.
12/01/2014
A rcrun(8) conversation
Robin Hahling wants feedback on where to go in DragonFly with rcrun(8), service(8), and similar commands. Follow the thread to see the various opinions.
11/30/2014
Lazy Reading for 2014/11/30
I’m going with links to some old-school crazy-hard projects this week. No simple hacks, these.
- Mysteries of the unix kind.
- Nerdy trivia about Unix time_t. (via)
- PDP-11/04 – Restoration. (via) Very nice pictures.
- Plan 9. Plan 9. Plan 9. Plan 9. (all via)
- Linux on Obsolete Displays Project Page. (via)
- USB Power Issues. That is definitely a hardware problem.
- Know Your UNIX System Administrator – A Field Guide. (via)
- Fitness machines for big data.
- It Ain’t Easy Making Money in Open Source.
- Historic Computer Images. Hosted by the U.S. military.
- EDSAC, the (only?) computer from the 1940s, is being rebuilt. No keyboard, no monitor.
- God’s Lonely Programmer. (via)
- Some light reading on lock-free programming.
- A Rare Peek into the Massive Scale of AWS. Their capitalization, not mine. (via)
- Metastable failure state. (also via)
- Stumbleupon’s Big Data Architecture Using Open Source Software. (via)
- Remote work: an engineering leader’s perspective. These articles never seem to note how open source developers fit this mold. (via)
11/29/2014
In Other BSDs for 2014/11/29
Despite the US holiday, here’s a pile of BSD material.
- BSD on Mini ITX.
- Can we talk about FreeBSD vs. Linux?
- DiscoverBSD for 2014/11/24.
- pkgsrc and i386 may have issues on partial rebuild. Or not? Follow the thread.
- lang/guile16 is leaving pkgsrc soon.
- check-update, a script for finding what packages in pkgsrc need to be updated.
- FreeBSD now has libgpio, I think for those general purpose I/O connectors on small ARM boards that are all the rage.
- FreeBSD has switched to mandoc.
- Your SGI hardware running OpenBSD will now tell you via LCD.
- Tools for checking for updated packages on OpenBSD. (read the whole thread)
- Conversations about a home PF-based router. “APU units run hot but are OK” seems to be the thread consensus.
11/28/2014
LDAP and DragonFly
Predrag Punosevac posted his writeup of using LDAP and DragonFly, which I’m noting here for the next person that needs LDAP authentication.
11/27/2014
BSDNow 065: 8,000,000 Mogofoo-ops
This week’s BSDNow episode, 8,000,000 Mogofoo-ops, includes an interview with Brendan Gregg of Netflix, along with more recent convention video links. It also mentions GNOME3 working on FreeBSD – it’s working on DragonFly too.
11/26/2014
XHCI and installing DragonFly
With a recent commit from Sascha Wildner, DragonFly now loads XHCI (meaning USB3) by default. If you had previously tried to install DragonFly via USB stick, and it inexplicably refused to mou t the installer drive… It may work much better now.
Release followups
There’s an extended article about the DragonFly 4.0 release on linuxfr.org. You need to be able to read French to enjoy it fully, or perhaps through translation, but it goes into some good depth.
11/25/2014
DragonFly 4.0 released!
The 4.0 release of DragonFly is out! Quoting from the release page:
Version 4 of DragonFly brings Haswell graphics support, 3D acceleration, and improved performance in extremely high-traffic networks. DragonFly now supports up to 256 CPUs, Haswell graphics (i915), concurrent pf operation, and a variety of other devices.
The more eagle-eyed downloader will notice it’s version 4.0.1, not 4.0.0. That’s because nobody trusts .0 releases I tagged 4.0.0 just before a few useful commits went in, and it’s better to retag to make sure everyone got them. See also my message to kernel@/users@
11/24/2014
Books books books
I’ve placed an image slider over on the right side of the website; it’s all BSD-related books. Each image is linked to a page about the book where you can buy it. It’s not paid advertising, or perhaps advertising at all; there’s no in-kind benefit. It’s specifically books I think people would find interesting to read, and we’d all benefit by the expansion of the BSD ‘ecosystem’.
The most recent edition added is Michael W. Lucas’s FreeBSD Mastery: Storage Essentials, which is out in ebook form today, and printed form soon.
Several DragonFly updates
I’m working on the 4.0 release, but in the meantime, I wanted to point at a slew of updates from Sascha Wildner: ACPICA 20141107, pciconf(8), axge(4), and the kernel part of the netgraph7 Bluetooth stack.
11/23/2014
Lazy Reading for 2014/11/23
Lots to read this week.
- The Open Source Financial Developers Association has a very complete calendar of open source events around NYC. (via)
- Google Code-in 2014 has announced its mentoring orgs.
- Also, Google Summer of Code 2015 has been announced.
- Facebook’s New Data Center Is Bad News for Cisco. Somewhat free of technical data, but I do like the idea of more software-defined networking. (via)
- NSA vs. encryption, 40 years ago. (via)
- schmutz. Ah, the joys of Unicode. (via)
- Sort of related: this is just mean. (via IRC, I think)
- SSHelper. I’m going to buy a new phone just so I can use this. I want my handheld computer to actually be a computer, darnit. This is from the guy who created Apple Writer, of all things. (also via)
- List of Physical Visualizations. (via)
- After Docker. Docker and similar items appear to be an attempt to change an operating system from a place where you work to a thin wrapping around a program you run. Dunno if I like that. (via)
- Barbie, computer engineer, which has created more responses.
- A brief history of graphics. Video game graphics, specifically.
- The Nostalgia Nerds Who Rescue Old Games From Oblivion. Similar. (via)
- I like the concept behind “Let’s Encrypt“, though I quibble with the tools selected. (via)
- A video about the Internet in 1995. (via)
- “With varying degrees, everyone has this drawer in their house.“
- IFComp winners will provide a great deal of reading/playing time.
Your unrelated link of the week: Snowpocalypse 2014. I grew up there and now live not too far away. That’s really not that much snow for the area; it’s just that it fell so quickly.
